Page 47 - The Errors the American National Academy of Sciences

The NAS's Error on Natural Selection

They seek to give the impression that no matter how random the muta-
tions selected by natural selection may be, since natural selection se-
lects those that are best adapted, the overall result is not random. It is as
though a conscious mechanism entered the equation.
However, anyone examining the subject a little deeper will see

through the deception here: Natural selection is not a conscious
mechanism capable of planning or foresight. This is most clearly re-
vealed in the study of irreducibly complex organs: these structures
only provide any benefit to an organism when they are fully formed.
For instance, during the transition from water to land, which evolu-
tionists so fondly dream of, natural selection would not select
changes in a fish that might have produced only a few components of
a lung. A structure that lacks any of the characteristics of a perfect
lung is of no benefit to a land creature. Since natural selection is also

unable to calculate that a fish might shortly emerge onto land and
would therefore need a lung—and that the lung would therefore need
to undergo many intermediate stages waiting for the accumulation of
alterations—it would not select those changes. In this way, an animal
with only a few of the necessary changes would be eliminated.
As the world-famous historian of biology William Coleman
indicates:

The organism, being a functionally integrated whole each part of
which stood in close relation to every other part, could not, under
pain of almost immediate extinction, depart significantly from the
norms established for the species by the first anatomical rule.
Amajor change, for example, a sharp increase in the heart beat or
the diminution by half of the kidney and thus a reduction in renal
secretion, would by itself have wrought havoc with the general con-
stitution of the animal. In order that an animal might persist after a
change of this magnitude it would be necessary that the other or-

45